DATA WALKING

A research project exploring data gathering & data visualisation

PHASE TWO: AMSTERDAM
In October 2015, I visited Amsterdam for a weekend. Most of the visit was exploring the many streets and canal sides on foot (with a little cycling) and taking lots of photos. Presented here are many of the photos and an exploration of fulfilling one of the original aims of the Data Walking project: to imagine a city as a three dimensional volume or ‘dataspace’, and be able to cut transects through that city of data.

The tools used were a smartphone with the GPS location accessible to the camera, Open Source programming software Processing, freely available for most operating systems, with the Unfolding Maps library for Processing by Til Nagel, and ExifTool by Phil Harvey. This contrasts with the first and current phases which make use of microcontrollers and environmental sensors to gather data, the idea that even ambient information gathering can yield interesting data. The outcome was a printed publication detailing the process of taking a collection of photos and creating maps, routes, volumes, in 2D and 3D, using computational design methods. Also below is an animation rendering travelling through the whole Amsterdam data volume.

Data Walking is an ongoing research project initiated by David Hunter.